FORUM on PSYCHIATRY and the HUMANITIES
Marshall Alcorn, PhD, Chair
Gordon Kirschner, MD, Resident Agent
The Forum advances the founding vision of the Washington School of Psychiatry through interdisciplinary collaboration with noted scholars and exposition to the public at large through the Weigert Lecture series. The Forum Seminar is a meeting place for all those interested in humanist study of the mind, including clinicians with special interests in the arts and the humanities as well as scholars and artists from clinical studies who seek insight into the human condition. The Forum aims to provide a voice for members of the School who can contribute to current thought in psychoanalysis and the humanities.
Our Lecture series honors Edith Weigert, MD, who left her native Germany in 1934 and came to the United States in 1938. In Washington she quickly became a central figure in the founding of the local psychoanalytic society. In Germany she had trained and worked with the major figures in psychoanalysis and had a broad view of the profession's possibilities. She joined with Harry Stack Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichman and others in the development of the Washington School of Psychiatry. From 1974 to 2003 the eponymous lectures have been presented by a range of important participants such as Paul Ricoeur, Noam Chomsky, Harold Bloom, Victor Turner, William J. Richardson, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, Roy Schafer, John E. Gedo, Robert M. Galatzer-Levy, Joseph Brent, Elaine Scarry, Arnold H. Modell, Vamik D. Volkan, Wilfried ver Eecke and others.
Seminar members currently include professors of history, philosophy and rhetoric along with psychoanalytic clinicians of varied backgrounds. Most recently the seminar has been occupied with the study of attachment; the leader for this study is Mauricio Cortina, director of the new Attachment and Human Development Center of the School.
FORUM BOARD of DIRECTORS
- Marshall Alcorn, Chair
- Gordon Kirschner, Resident Agent
- Jodi Brayton
- Macario Giraldo
- Afaf Mafouz
- Evelyn Schreiber
- Wilfried Ver Eecke